My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Joan Luther (1928–2011), who knew restaurants better than anyone

  EPIGRAPH

  La tavola è mezza confessione.

  —TUSCAN PROVERB

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1 Chasen’s, West Hollywood (1936–1995)

  2 Trader Vic’s, Beverly Hills (1955–2007)

  3 The Ranch House, Meiners Oaks, California (1958– )

  4 El Coyote Cafe, Los Angeles (1931– )

  5 The Adriatic, Los Angeles (1964–1974)

  6 Aux Amis du Beaujolais, Paris (1921–2009)

  7 Scandia, West Hollywood (1946–1989)

  8 Café Swiss, Beverly Hills (1950–1985)

  9 Piccolo Mondo, Rome (1954– )

  10 Ports, West Hollywood (1972–1992)

  11 Ma Maison, West Hollywood (1973–1985) & Spago, West Hollywood (1982–2000)

  12 Hostellerie du Vieux Moulin, Bouilland, France (194?– )

  13 El Motel, Figueres, Spain (1961– ) & Eldorado Petit, Barcelona (1978–2001)

  14 The West Beach Café, Venice, California (1978–1996) & Rebecca’s, Venice, California (1983–1998)

  15 Eleven Madison Park, New York City (1998– )

  16 Country Choice, Nenagh, Ireland (1982– ) & elBulli, Cala Montjoi (Roses), Spain (1961–2011)

  Envoi

  Photograph Section

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Colman Andrews

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE BOOK THAT FOLLOWS IS FULL OF DETAILS ABOUT what I ate and drank, how restaurants and other places looked, and what people said and did at various points in my life, even when I’m recounting events that took place more than half a century ago. In summoning up these particulars, I’ve relied in part, of course, on that seductive trickster, memory, but memory has been greatly aided by the fact that, at least since my latter teens, I’ve taken notes. I have thousands of pages—on lined school paper, yellow legal tablets, sheets of “bloc-notes” bound in Rhodia orange; in typescripts banged out on my old Adler manual or my Selectric II—full of observations, descriptions, bits of conversation, menus, and more, and then, of course, thousands of computer files, holding everything from e-mails to interview notes to assorted recollections, published and unpublished. For one stretch in the 1970s, I even kept extensive journals of my own, eventually filling half a dozen hardbound notebooks with something close to 250,000 words about every aspect of my life over that period. A big box of deliberately unorganized photographs, some dating back almost three-quarters of a century, and a basement shelf of cartons containing four or five decades’ worth of restaurant menus from both coasts of America and six or eight European countries helped me fill in some of the blanks.

  I referred to a handful of books, as well, to verify facts or refresh recollections, among them A Corner of Chicago, a memoir by my late father, Robert Hardy Andrews; A Taste of Hollywood by Patrick Terrail; Chasen’s: Where Hollywood Dined and Hollywood du Jour: Lost Recipes of Hollywood Haunts by Betty Goodwin; Burgundy by Eunice Fried; and several editions of the Guide GaultMillau, the Los Angeles Restaurant Guide by Lois Dwan, and my own Southern California restaurant guides under several titles. Of course, I also depended heavily, as one does these days, on our indispensable if sometimes vexing friend Mr. Internet—more than once discovering that the cited source for something I was looking up was one of my own old articles. Among the friends and acquaintances who answered questions of various kinds were Karen Miller, Gordana Sipovac, Julie Stone, Barbara Berg, Eunice Fried, Kerry Heffernan, Jean-Pierre Silva, Judith Sonntag, and Becky Wasserman. (My agent, Michael Psaltis, offered sound editorial advice, as always. Dan Halpern saw merit in the idea for this memoir and commissioned me to write it; Libby Edelson fine-tuned the manuscript.)

  Any factual errors, misinterpretations, unfair characterizations, concatenations of events, and other deviations from the way things really were is, of course, my own doing, deliberately or not. In any case, as John Ruskin once proposed in a different context, “The errors of affection are better than the accuracies of apathy.”

  Introduction

  I’m walking down the street in an unfamiliar city. It’s dark, a little chilly, a little past most people’s dinnertime. The stores are closed. A few cars prowl by, and a delivery van idles at the curb, but there’s almost no one on the sidewalks—just a woman in gym clothes walking a dog, say, and maybe a couple of late workers crossing from their office building to the parking garage. I round a corner, heading vaguely back to my hotel, and catch the faint scent of grilled meat in the air. I haven’t eaten, and it draws me like the aroma of an apple pie cooling on a windowsill used to draw young miscreants in old cartoons. I keep walking, following my nose, until I see, at the end of the next block, an inviting low-slung building with a big red door and a row of half-curtained windows through which a warm glow seeps. As I get closer, a smiling couple comes out of the place, and for a few seconds, before the door eases shut, I hear from inside a familiar din—the clatter of plates and glasses, the hum of conversation. I walk straight to the door and step inside. A willowy young woman in her twenties—or maybe it’s a stocky, well-dressed gentleman thirty years her senior—greets me, reassures me that the kitchen is still open, and shows me into the dining room. I sit down, unfurl the napkin, order a Hendrick’s martini—very cold, please, with a twist—and pick up the menu with as much agreeable anticipation as a crime-novel buff opening the latest Michael Connelly. I’m perfectly content, and for a very good reason: Even though I’ve never been here before, I’m at home.

  I GREW UP IN RESTAURANTS. I don’t mean that my parents owned or ran them—my father was a Hollywood screenwriter, my mother a onetime ingenue turned housewife and society dame—but they practically lived in restaurants themselves, and when they went out to eat, they often took me with them. Some of my earliest memories are of perching on a booster seat in a red or green leather booth at a table covered in thick white napery and crowded with silverware and glasses, and being waited on and fed and plied with Shirley Temples and told to sit up straight. I can still summon up a sensory impression of those evenings, romanticized, of course, and with the particulars of each occasion blurred hopelessly together, but vivid nonetheless: the ceaseless motion all around me, a choreography of waiters and busboys, arriving and departing guests; the reassuring clamor that suggested room-wide concord and contentment; the aromas intertwining in the air—cigarette smoke, Sterno, sizzling meat, coffee, the iodine-scented whisky in my father’s glass, the floral sweetness of my mother’s best perfume. It all washed over me, and never really went away.

  At far too young an age, I’m sure, I fell in love with restaurants, and it was that love that ultimately led me to where I am today. My entrée, if you’ll pardon the expression, into the world of what I later would call gastronomy came through the dining room, not the kitchen. I liked the food, certainly, but I also liked the ritual, the folderol, the whole experience—the way a place looked and felt, the friendliness and efficiency of the staff, the variety of choice, even the little sensory accents: the heft of the water glass, the dancing light of the table candle, the luxurious sensation of wiping greasy fingers on soft linen.

  Eventually, almost accidentally, I found a way to turn my love for restaurants into a career—into, really, a way of life. When I first started to think seriously about that way of life and where it had taken me, it occurred to me not just that restaurants have been a constant f
or me but also that at virtually every stage of my existence, there has been at least one restaurant at the center of things for me, both literally and symbolically. This is a book about those restaurants, and about my life in and around them. They’re a diverse bunch—some, world-famous temples of haute cuisine; others, more notable for their character or their clientele than for their cooking. All too many of them have vanished. I’ve picked them out for present purposes because they have been touchstones for me, personally and professionally, but also because they represent something, different in every case, about the history and culture of food in America and Western Europe. They are places that in some way help define who and what I was and have become, but that are also, for the most part, emblematic of the revolutions great and small, over the past half century or so, that have changed the way we eat and cook and think and feel about food.

  Chapter One

  CHASEN’S,

  West Hollywood (1936–1995)

  MY PARENTS WERE THE PERFECT RESTAURANT goers: Dad made good money writing screenplays and Mom couldn’t cook. They loved dining out, loved dressing up and hobnobbing, loved getting their names in what were then called the “society pages,” and they went to all the best and smartest places in Los Angeles. They had courted at one of the most famous local restaurants of them all, the legendary Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. Romanoff’s was a glamorous movie-business boîte presided over by a onetime Lithuanian pants presser who had reinvented himself as a Russian prince; the menu offered beluga caviar, frogs’ legs, calf’s brains, and the slightly naughty-sounding Devilled Turkey Casanova for Two, and everyone who mattered in Hollywood ate there.

  I never got taken to Romanoff’s, for whatever reasons, but I went along almost everywhere else: the always bustling Hollywood Brown Derby, hung with charcoal caricatures of the same stars who were frequently sitting at various booths around the room; the cool and clubby Tail o’ the Cock on La Cienega Boulevard’s “Restaurant Row,” where I discovered swordfish and sand dabs and drank fruit punch (and much later French 75s) out of tall frosted glasses; the handsomely appointed Beverly Hills Hotel dining room, where I ate prime rib au jus (pronounced “o juice”), carved from a silver-domed gueridon by a white-haired chef named Henry; the stylish King’s in West Hollywood, where I saw my first live lobsters, languishing in big glass tanks against one wall—and found, probably to my parents’ surprise, that the notion of picking out my dinner while it was still moving didn’t bother me at all.

  Not everything was fancy. Dad took me to lunch at the commissary at whichever studio was employing him, and to film-business haunts like Oblatt’s, a few feet from the Paramount Studios gates, where I’d delight to see cowboys and Indians and Romans and medieval dukes in full costume and makeup slurping spaghetti at the counter, and Lucey’s, a sprawling mock-adobe place across the street from Paramount, where I appreciated the Monte Cristo sandwiches (and where, Dad once told me, “more careers have been made and ended than on any movie lot in town”).

  Mom fed me at department store tearooms—Waldorf salad or cream cheese sandwiches on walnut-raisin bread, while I perched on wrought-iron chairs with pastel cushions—and at drugstore lunch counters, institutions that today have all but vanished, where I’d spin my stool from side to side and order a cheeseburger or a breaded veal cutlet and a milk shake made before my eyes in one of those splendid chrome-and-pistachio-green Hamilton Beach contraptions. If I was good, I’d get taken to Blum’s in Beverly Hills, an outpost of the San Francisco original, where the main attraction was a kind of devil’s salad bar—a do-it-yourself sundae cart wheeled around to every table, loaded with six or eight different kinds of ice cream and with toppings of every sort, from hot fudge and butterscotch to nuts, whipped cream, and nonpareils, to be assembled and combined and gloriously overdone at will. I loved it all.

  The restaurant that made the most indelible impression on me, though, was Chasen’s. I’m pretty sure it was the first restaurant I ever set foot in, though “set foot” is not the right term—there is photographic evidence somewhere of my early appearance there when I was still literally a babe in arms—and it is definitely the first restaurant that I remember specifically. It was also almost certainly the restaurant I went to the most often in my first fifteen years or so of life, and the one that shaped most strongly my admittedly idyllic image of what a restaurant should be.

  Chasen’s was originally Chasen’s Southern Pit, opened as a chili parlor and barbecue joint in 1936 by an ex-vaudeville comedian named Dave Chasen. Chasen had been the stooge, or comic foil, to a celebrated headliner named Joe Cook. Cook could juggle, sing, dance, and tell jokes, and built elaborate Rube Goldberg–like constructions onstage; Chasen’s job was to play the fool (he typically sported a red fright wig and blacked-out teeth), the bumbler, dropping things, tripping, goofing up Cook’s supposedly serious endeavors. The duo had considerable success on the New York stage, and even appeared together in an early Frank Capra opus, Rain or Shine—but the closing of many theaters during the Depression and the ascendancy of the movies as popular entertainment had killed vaudeville by 1932 or ’33, and the act broke up.

  As an itinerant performer, Chasen had started cooking chili backstage for his fellow vaudevillians, and he became the designated chef at weekend parties at Cook’s estate on Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, turning out not just chili but barbecued spareribs and steaks. One of the regulars at these affairs was Harold Ross, founder and editor of The New Yorker, and at some point, questioning the future of his show business career, Chasen approached Ross with the idea of opening a restaurant. Ross agreed to invest thirty-five hundred dollars in the project—on the condition that Chasen set up shop in Stamford, Connecticut, where Ross lived. Happily for Hollywood, the location Ross had in mind burned down before a deal could be made, and around the same time another vaudevillian, returning from the West Coast, reported that you couldn’t get a decent steak out there. Chasen knew all about decent steaks, and with Frank Capra’s encouragement and Ross’s blessing, he moved west, bought a stucco shack on the edge of a cornfield where Beverly Boulevard met Doheny Drive, and opened for business. Capra and James Cagney were among the first-nighters.

  The Southern Pit was a small place—a cramped kitchen, six tables, an eight-stool counter, and a six-stool bar, with a few Ping-Pong tables out back—and business was spotty at first, but Chasen was well liked and had good Hollywood connections and word got around. Less than a year after he opened, he was again playing to packed houses and was able to enlarge the place. He eventually added a second story to the original shack and installed a sauna and a barbershop behind the dining room. In 1940, Chasen dropped the “Southern Pit” portion of his restaurant’s name.

  At first, the menu at his restaurant was minimal: chili, ribs, and a dish Chasen christened “hobo steak,” based on a recipe he’d gotten from a fellow vaudevillian. This was a thick New York strip steak wrapped in leaf lard and encased in a crust of salt, roasted very rare at a high temperature, then finished at the table: a captain would crack open the crust with a mallet, slice the steak on a wooden cutting board, then season the slices and cook them to order in foaming butter in a copper chafing dish. The meat was served atop croutons of sourdough bread fried in butter and was (at least as I knew it in the sixties and seventies) about the most delicious thing imaginable.

  The barbershop and sauna didn’t last very long, but the building continued to grow over the years (together with its parking lot, it occupied most of the former cornfield by the time it closed), and as the restaurant grew, the food evolved. The ribs were phased out except by special order, and the chili and the hobo steak vanished (though both were always available to anyone who knew enough to ask for them). By the time I was old enough to read the menu, the choices included thirty or so appetizers, soups, and salads and forty or fifty main dishes—a veritable catalog of mid-twentieth-century “continental” and upscale American cooking, from shrimp cocktail, Caesar salad, and jellied consommé t
o lobster Newburg, chicken tetrazzini, and saddle of lamb with sauce béarnaise, and all the way on to strawberry shortcake and crêpes Suzette.

  The clientele grew, too. A New York contingent—James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, and other friends of Harold Ross—made it their clubhouse. “They all pretended that they hadn’t unpacked their suitcases because they weren’t planning on staying very long in California,” Dad once told me, “but the truth is they loved it here.” The stars of Hollywood loved it, too. W. C. Fields played Ping-Pong with a drink in one hand, Ray Bolger was known to soft-shoe through the dining room, and Frank Morgan (whose best-known role was as the Wizard of Oz) used to perform stripteases on the bar. Jimmy Stewart had his bachelor party there in 1949, complete with two midgets (as they were then called) garbed in diapers jumping out of a cake. A pint-size Shirley Temple threw a tantrum at the restaurant one night because she couldn’t have a cocktail like her parents, so Chasen improvised an alcohol-free concoction that he named for her—ginger ale with a splash of grenadine, garnished with a maraschino cherry—quite possibly the first-ever “mocktail.”

  Howard Hughes was a Chasen’s regular in his movie-producer days, and hired Chasen to cater in-flight meals when he took over TWA. A list of other stalwarts reads like a checklist of Old Hollywood luminaries: Orson Welles, Cary Grant, Lana Turner, Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Peter Lorre, Gregory Peck, Bob Hope, George Burns, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor (who liked the chili so much that she had it air-freighted to her in Rome when she was filming Cleopatra), Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Groucho Marx, Clark Gable, Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra . . . And it wasn’t just Hollywood: J. Edgar Hoover came in when he was in town, as did, it was said, “every U.S. president since 1936 except Roosevelt.”